MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA – The big trends emerging from the show go beyond AI and more toward how to move fast and scale with little investment. Many of the folks we spoke to today noted MWC’s transformation from a mobile show to a comms show – more than ever before. Are we witnessing the birth of a new Supercomm? Maybe so.
When it comes to big trends emerging, we have all heard so many announcements around as-a-service models, whether that’s AI, GPU or even 5G core, that we’ve collectively decided that as-a-service is where it’s at this year. Blast from the past? Everything comes full circle, it seems.
Scroll down to read more from Wednesday at the show.
Check out our written coverage from the day
MWC: Intel VP questions the worth of GPUs for AI-RAN
Intel’s Alex Quach suggests that for RAN sites, there just isn’t the power available to run energy-intensive GPUs.
MWC: New buzzword drops — 'neocloud' — and Juniper is on it
Juniper introduced a solution purpose-built for neocloud providers, traditional service providers and other AI cloud providers who are deploying and managing GPUaaS and AIaaS to speed up deployments and simplify operations.
MWC: T-Mobile XR trials yet another reminder of its 5G SA leadership
The “un-carrier” is the first in the world to deploy a nationwide 5G standalone (SA) network and it’s getting a lot of attention from attendees near and far during this week’s cellular industry shindig.
MWC: ZTE buffs 5G-A chops with China Mobile
Chinese network vendor ZTE used the MWC telco jamboree to show off its 5G-Advanced chops with leading domestic network operator China Mobile.
Quotes of the day
“[MWC] is a telecommunications networking ecosystem event,” Joe Cumello, SVP and GM, Blue Planet,” told us. “It's AI; it's hyperscale; or intersecting with AI, and then the communications industry. It's certainly mobile, yeah, but it's everything else as well, and it has become a much more an end-to-end event on the telecommunications or networking infrastructure business vs. five years ago.”
“You don’t want to build the church for Easter," said Daniel Lawson, SVP global solutions, Verizon business, describing the wastefulness of over-investing capacity far ahead of demand.
Seen and heard
SDN: food for thought
At the Intel booth, we chatted with Network and Edge Group VP Cristina Rodriguez about the trend for operators to virtualize everything. Verizon Networks Chief Joe Russo recently published a piece noting that Verizon has more than 22,900 vRAN site locations across the country.
This got us wondering about the old software-defined networking (SDN) trend. “Nobody has ever gone software defined and said this was a bad idea,” Rodriguez said. “Nobody who has gone to software defined has ever abandoned that. When we did it in the core, it took us a few years to get there, but once we hit 50%, it went really fast, and now more than 90% of the core network is today virtualized” industry-wide.
Let’s talk about 6G
At the NTT DoCoMo exhibit, Chief Standardization Officer Takehiro Nakamura provided some thoughts on 6G from the perspective of the Japanese service provider.
How much of a generational change will 6G be? Will 6G be a whole new core? Or will it be smaller incremental changes with a nod to all the investments in 5G and 5G Advanced?
“That is under discussion,” he said, noting a “variety of opinions.” Of course, “we want to have a smooth transition with a reasonable cost. We don’t want to change everything from 5G to 6G.”
On the other hand, the networks should evolve and improve to meet the market demand. “The market demand will be higher and higher” and AI will potentially generate additional peak traffic. “We need to prepare.”
Nokia’s one giant leap
Nokia and Intuitive Machines land on the moon tomorrow, Thursday, March 6. For Peter Vetter, President of Bell Labs Core Research at Nokia, it’s a bittersweet moment as he vividly remembers being a young boy watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Vetter chatted with us from the Nokia booth at MWC in Barcelona while his co-president Thierry Klein headed to Houston’s Johnson Space Center for the landing. Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communication System (“LSCS”) is installed in the IM-2 mission lander, named Athena, and landing tomorrow in the south pole region of the intend to deploy the first cellular network on the Moon.
The LSCS is a “network in a box” built to survive the stresses of take-off and landing, operate in the vacuum of space and cope with the Moon’s widely fluctuating temperatures, said Vetter.
The LSCS is a core network and a base station, which will connect into NASA's proprietary microwave network. It will be landing around 6:00 PM Central European time tomorrow. It’s mission? Help scientists investigate Mons Mouton, a lunar mountain and possibly a remnant of the rim of the South Pole–Aitken basin, one of the oldest, largest and deepest impact craters in the Solar System. Read more about the mission here.
MWC oddity of the day
This head on a stick caught us off guard. It’s a demo for a facial recognition software company called Metalenz, but it was definitely a creepy sight to catch out of the corner of your eye.
Read our previous wraps below:
MWC: Seen and heard on Day 1 - ‘Slow is the new down’
MWC: Seen and heard on Day 2 - ‘I just need time to think’
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